Productions featuring famous bands or other music stars, as well as musicals, plays, and other forms of entertainment are often touring productions. These productions typically appear at a particular venue in a particular city for a limited time, often just a single show on a single night. Despite the limited nature of the engagements, the staging of such productions is usually complex and highly customized. As a result, shows generally travel with their own caravan of stage equipment that is assembled and disassembled at each stop along the tour.
Assembling and disassembling the stage is a time consuming chore that generally entails many persons, often referred to as road-hands or “roadies,” working many long hours. Furthermore, the tour schedule usually leaves little time to spare between performances and the stage assembly/disassembly can be a race against the clock. Touring productions are usually very expensive to produce and additional costs can have an adverse effect on a production's overall profitability.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to leave certain portions of stage equipment already assembled to save time between shows. However, doing so is impractical with current stage designs because of space constraints. Leaving pieces pre-assembled could save time, but means pieces would not stack as well. This, in turn, would require more trucks to transport the equipment and can result in unacceptably high transportation costs.
Alternatively, disassembling stage equipment to the point that it stacks efficiently requires sufficient personnel to ensure that schedules are still maintained, resulting in increased labor costs. It also increases the opportunity for mistakes and the possibility that something will be misplaced and/or re-assembled incorrectly.
What is needed is a structure for staged productions that overcomes these and other drawbacks in current staging equipment.